The Rise of Legal Status Restrictions in State Welfare Policy

• In Event: 065 - Regular Session. Social Welfare Programs

Abstract

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was Governor of California, and unauthorized immigrants’ use of welfare was on the state’s legislative agenda. Reagan declared that non-citizens in “uncounted numbers” were making use of public assistance, representing “an abuse of the welfare system,” and he called on the legislature to ban unauthorized immigrants from public welfare programs. In New York, too, a similar controversy was brewing. In 1972, officials there claimed that 25,000—or even as many as 100,000—unauthorized immigrants were making use of public assistance, contributing to budget shortfalls and the overall “welfare mess.” Officials called for greater cooperation between welfare and immigration authorities in order to deport those who dared to apply. In this paper, I make extensive use of state and local archives, newspaper accounts and government hearings to show how and why officials in California and New York became concerned about unauthorized immigrants’ use of social welfare in the early 1970s, and moved to bar them from state welfare programs. While a number of factors help to explain the growing concern over this issue, I use the state comparison to highlight three factors common to both states: 1) the presence of growing racialized anti-welfare sentiment; 2) the role of local INS officials who politicized the issue for their own ends; and 3) the limits the Supreme Court placed on states’ ability to regulate their social welfare programs.

Author

• Cybelle Fox, UC Berkeley